Sushil Bhasin breathes life into rocks

Shimmer Kapoor likes to colour her hair a glittering pink while her neighbour, a homemaker, who dresses traditionally, has a fascination for hard metal and wants to do power yoga with Brad Pitt! Then there is a movie buff who likes to call himself the Pirate of Kapurthala. And have you heard of a doctor who wishes you Happy Root canal? These characters exist, but none of them are for real. They are all cartoon characters made on stones by Sushil Bhasin, a compulsive cartoonist in the city.

A marketing professional by the day, Bhasin breathes life into rocks at night. Over the course of the corporate career, he has doodled through meetings, conference calls and had his own in-flight entertainment. In 2005, Bhasin went to Rishikesh and generally picked up these white, curved stones and started doodling on them. That’s where his journey with the pebble people began. “Tooling with rocks, drawing on them, smearing colour (with hands) on them and coming out with funny one liners for the characters is hard work, and time-consuming, but it’s a great relaxation activity,” says the doodler.

Bhasin uses all kinds of materials from acrylic and oil paints to metallic pens, fabric based tapes, artificial moustaches and bindis to create the characters. He now buys sacks of stones from the vendors on Mehrauli, Gurgaon road for his creation. Bhasin adds a bubble behind the characters as an afterthought of what the character could be thinking. His characters include the Gabbar Uncle saying, Kammo Baby, and a confident South Indian with the bubble If Rajni Kant, I can. “I work with the imperfections of the rock to create different expressions. So, no two characters are the same,” says the pebble doodler. The Viagra rock saying, I applied Viagra on my head by mistake takes the cake as it shocks and makes you laugh at the same time.